Information and Noise — How Messages Survive Damaged Channels
Begin with dots and dashes on a telegraph line, then measure surprise in bits, locate errors with spare symbols, compress repetition into a dictionary, and ask for the limit of reliable transmission through noise. Travel from the Washington–Baltimore line and a fixed-length Paris code to bandwidth and logarithmic information in New York; switches, entropy, and Hamming codes in Cambridge and Bell Labs; finite-field polynomials in Lexington; algorithmic information in Moscow; universal compression in Haifa; and near-capacity codes and industrial standards in Brest, Kariya, and Ankara. This is not one genius’s invention of ‘the digital.’ Lines, laboratories, universities, factories, and standards networks all helped messages survive.
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1844
Washington DC
Turning a Sentence into Timed Dots, Dashes, and Spaces — Morse and Vail’s Telegraph Line
On the congressionally funded Washington–Baltimore experimental line, Samuel Morse sent a message on 24 May 1844 and Alfred Vail received it in Baltimore. Encoding letters as short and long signals plus spaces let language travel through a physical wire. But code, apparatus, and operation were not Morse’s work alone, and a telegraph code that gave frequent letters short patterns is not the same thing as a modern fixed-length binary code or information theory.
Replay on the map from scene 1Scene index